The decision not to cast Chase was made for Landis when Chase chose to star opposite Goldie Hawn in Foul Play rather than appear in Animal House.  With Chase out of the picture the role went to Tim Matheson, a former child actor whose most recent role had been on The Quest, a short-lived TV series in which he co-starred opposite Kurt Russell.

In order to appease Universal’s growing fear that there were no stars in the film, Landis and Mount called on Donald Sutherland.  Landis knew Sutherland because he’d appeared in Kentucky Fried Movie.  Sutherland agreed to appear in the film as a favor to both Landis and Mount, taking the role of Jennings, the English professor who turns Katie, Boon and Pinto on to pot.  He ended up only spending two days on film’s Eugene, Oregon set, commuting from San Francisco where he was shooting The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Sutherland’s decision to commit to the project was crucial.  No longer as concerned about the star quotient of Animal House, the project proceeded. Landis says summarily, "It was Donald Sutherland who essentially got the movie made."

The rest of the leads went to several unknowns and stage actors, just as Landis had hoped.  Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark) was cast as Katie; Peter Reigert (Local Hero and The Mask) landed the role of Otter’s sidekick Boon; Tom Hulce (Amadeus) became Pinto; Kevin Bacon got his first film part as Chip Diller, a smarmy Omega pledge; and a pizza deliveryman / struggling actor named Stephen Furst (St. Elsewhere) won the role of Flounder. 

In a now classic Hollywood story, prior to being cast, Furst was supporting himself and promoting his career by delivering boxes of pizza… with his headshot in them.  Unbelievably, that’s how he was discovered by the production.  Matty Simmons opened the box of pizza he’d ordered only to find the future Flounder smiling back up at him.

With the cast in place, Landis, Mount and Reitman set out to find a location.  However, as you might be able to surmise, when the script was sent to university and college administrators across the country, it met nothing but rejection.  No one wanted to let his campus be used to promote frat partying.

Concerned that they might not be able to find a place to film, the production was rescued when the dean of students at University of Oregon offered his campus to them.  The reason for the Oregon president’s genuinely warm reception was that nearly a decade before he’d been the president of another school and rejected a producer’s request to film The Graduate on his campus because he didn’t like the script.   After The Graduate’s resounding success, the president had decided that he was no expert on film and vowed never to turn down another such request.  So he didn’t.

In preparation for the film, Landis brought the actors who would play the Deltas (Matheson, Riegert, Hulce, Furst, Bruce "D-Day" McGill and James "Hoover" Widdoes) up to Eugene a week and a half early to rehearse, get to know each other and bond like real fraternity brothers.  His efforts proved to be an unqualified success.  By the time that Kevin Bacon, Jim Daughton (who played Gregg Marmalarde) and Mark Metcalfe (who played Doug Neidermayer) arrived, the Deltas were a unit who screamed when their rivals entered the cafeteria, immediately calling them "dickheads", and started throwing food at them.

Another bonding experience for the on-screen Deltas came when Matheson, Reigert, McGill, Widdoes and Allen wound up at an Omega-like frat party on the Oregon campus and got their asses kicked by a real-live bunch of uptight, young Republican frat brothers.

Mercifully, Landis never was told about the fight, as he was saved by his first assistant director Cliff Coleman. A crusty, cowboy boot wearing, Sam Peckinpah veteran, it was Coleman who insisted that nobody tell the director a thing about the brawl and he also found the necessary medical care for the actors’ bruises, chipped teeth and other wounds.

"He was gruff and big and we were kind of like the grizzled old Sarge and the Private," Landis says of Coleman, adding that he was glad he never heard about the fight, noting, "I would have freaked out."

The 32-day shoot in Eugene was decidedly low-budget.  Landis had no trailer or office on the set and wasn’t able to see dailies for three weeks.   Landis’ wife, costume designer Debra Nadoolman, purchased most of the authentic period costumes (circa 1961) at local thrift stores.  Nadoolman and Belushi’s wife, Judy, made the togas for the famous party scene themselves.

Ultimately, the film was such a low priority for Universal that a crane was only available for two days of the Animal House shoot; the crane otherwise belonged to the studio’s far more important Incredible Hulk television series.

"We were given the dregs because we were a silly movie under the radar," Landis says.

The director’s years in film production, however, came in handy as far as getting around the problems that the project’s lower status brought about.  Having worked nearly every film set job imaginable since he had dropped out of high school 11 years earlier, Landis knew exactly what could and couldn’t be done.  Nowhere was this more evident than in shooting the film’s courtroom scene.  Overwhelmingly long on the page, Reitman bet Landis that he couldn’t complete the shoot in a single day.

"I started doing all of the tricks I knew," Landis says.  "I kept the camera in the same place and simply changed the people for reaction shots."

He won the bet.

Properly directing Belushi’s Bluto was another matter that Landis needed to deal with effectively in order to pull off the film. 

"We had to be careful with Bluto because he was the least realistic character," says Landis, "He’s a cartoon.  He is appetite."

Landis told Belushi that he should play Bluto as a cross between Harpo Marx and Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster.  Both characters possess voracious and rapacious appetites, but at heart are sweet.  If he didn’t get the essential sweetness of the Bluto character into Belushi’s performance, Landis would be left with a vulgar, primitive animal with no redeeming qualities.  Belushi understood the direction intuitively and delivered the film’s most memorable performance, punctuated by the fact that he is only on screen for short bursts.  "Bluto has entrances and exits; nothing else," Landis says, "He’s like a meteor flashing across the sky."

Kenney and Miller so enjoyed working on the project that they paid their own way to Eugene for the filming and took small roles in the film as Deltas named Hardbar (Miller) and Stork (Kenney).  Though they were just along for the ride at this point, their presence became essential when a classroom speech was needed to beef up Sutherland’s role.  Kenney (in a seeming replay of his performance in Ramis’ apartment) simply wrote it up while sitting on the set.

This moment was indicative of the manner in which much of the film’s charm derived from the improvising of material that occurred on the set.  The Delta trip to the grocery store was also improvised as Landis began throwing food items at Furst as he followed Matheson through the store aisles.  Refusing to cut, Landis captured the dismayed Furst as he tried to catch each piece of food while not dropping anything.  The moment is one of the film’s classic scenes.

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When the film finally wrapped, Landis was completely spent.  He was suffering from walking pneumonia and immediately headed for Mexico to dry himself out.  "It was all a great adventure,’ Landis says of the shoot, "And it rained every fucking day."

Back in LA, Universal executives (with the exception of Daniel and Mount) generally ignored the project and simply hoped that it had stayed on budget.

After his vacation, Landis returned to LA, where he again frightened Tanen by hiring the legendary Elmer Bernstein (The Great Escape and The Ten Commandments) to create a completely straight-faced score for the movie.  Using the same principle that guided his casting choices, he wanted a professional and serious score to make the film more believable and its satire more effective.

As Bernstein was crafting his score, Landis started showing the rough-cut of his film to Mount, Daniel and Tanen.  This was where some trouble began.  "Ned loved parts of the film and he hated parts of it," Mount states.

This came to a head after Tanen viewed the scene where several members of the Omega fraternity beat up Otter at a local motel.  After the scene ended, Tanen asked that the film be stopped and the lights turned on.  Tanen turned to look at Mount, Landis and Daniel who all sat in a dumbfounded silence.  "That’s not funny,’ Tanen said simply.

"It’s not supposed to be funny," Landis replied after a moment.

"We’re making comedies that aren’t supposed to be funny.  Is that it?" Tanen questioned in disbelief and stormed out of the screening room.

Tanen’s crazed behavior was omnipresent throughout the editing process.  During one screening he insisted that the Dexter Lake Club scene (in which Otter, Boon, Pinto and Flounder wind up in an all-black nightclub) be removed from the film, lest it cause African-American viewers to start riots in theaters that were showing the film.  It was only one of many such occurrences.

Mount and Daniel found that the best way to deal with the problem was to pay lip service to Tanen.  And for weeks, the two men promised Tanen that they’d see what they could do about extricating the scene.  With this weighing on their minds for so long, Mount and Daniel began to question whether or not Tanen may have had a point—-was it possible that the scene was offensive to African-Americans?—-so they decided to ask Richard Pryor to view the film and give his opinion on the matter.

Pryor and Mount watched the film alone in a screening room on the Universal lot.  After the film, Mount asked Pryor whether he considered the scene offensive.

"No, man," Pryor chuckled.  "It’s just fucking funny.  And you know what else is funny?"

"No," Mount replied.

"White people," Pryor said.  "White people are funny."

The scene stayed in. 

Animal House premiered at New York City’s Astor Theater on July 26, 1978.  During an after-party at the Village Gate nightclub, Tanen and other Universal executives chased after Mount to express their fear that black patrons would be ripping out the seats when the movie was released to the general public.

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Animal House is a film that was created in part to keep a valued employee from leaving a magazine.  Its source material was chanced upon in a moment of desperation and was crafted by three men who had never before written a screenplay.  The treatment for the film was rejected by nearly every studio in Hollywood.  It might never have been made into a film at all, had it not been discovered by a 23-year old assistant who pressed his volatile and partially insane boss to get the film into production.  It was directed by a high school dropout who had only two underground films to his credit and was it cast primarily with unknowns.  It is a film that the studio could have cared less about and its chances of becoming a hit were not unlike those of Springtime for Hitler.

Released in 1978, Animal House spent years as the highest grossing film comedy of all-time and was the seventh highest grossing film released during the 1970’s, behind classics and box office giants like Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist and The Sting.  Today, it ranks 49th on Variety magazine’s all-time list of adjusted box office champions.  Ghostbusters, Home Alone and Beverly Hills Cop are the only comedies with a higher adjusted gross income.

The film’s influence, however, goes far beyond its box office receipts.  Animal House broke down the traditional boundaries of film comedy and dealt openly with sex, generational politics and race.  In addition, Landis set the tone for future film comedy by using a cast of serious actors, backed by a traditional soundtrack, to underscore the inherent comedy and to make the film believable.  It’s a formula that has been copied so many times that now it is the traditional method of creating such a film.

Animal House’s tone, style and structure have been copied time and again can be seen in many of the films of most successful comedic filmmakers of the last 25 years.

The cast and crew of Animal House also went on to have a major impact on the world of film.  Together and individually, Reitman, Ramis and Landis have produced, directed and written movies like Caddyshack, The Blues Brothers, Ghostbusters, Stripes, Analyze This, Groundhog Day, Trading Places and National Lampoon’s Vacation. 

Animal House catapulted Belushi into the national spotlight and kicked off a career that saw him become the most bankable male comedy star in the world until his 1982 death from a drug overdose.  Doug Kenney also died young, falling to his death from a Hawaiian cliff in 1980.

Perhaps the strangest developments regarding the cast are that Tim Matheson and Bruce McGill, both members of the subversive Delta House, are now routinely asked to play mainstream authority figures.  Matheson serves as Martin Sheen’s vice president on The West Wing while McGill had recently made a career out of playing judges, professors and CEO’s.

Kevin Bacon has become a movie star.  Karen Allen and Tom Hulce went on to successful careers as supporting players in Hollywood movies.

As of this writing, Peter Riegert is busy trying to put a film of his into pre-production.

Ned Tanen is now retired and lives in Santa Monica, apparently on the proper medication.

John Landis continues to produce and direct film projects.  He lives in Beverly Hills and can’t understand why anyone would chose to live in a cold weather climate, like Chicago.

Chris Miller is a screenwriter and high school film teacher in Los Angeles. 

Harold Ramis is an immensely successful film director and screenwriter.  He lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago

Based in part on the success of Animal House, Thom Mount became a Hollywood wonder boy.  For a time he ran Universal and was one of the youngest studio chiefs in Hollywood.  Legend has it that he was the model for the Tim Robbins’ character in Robert Altman’s The Player.  Today, he is an executive with RKO Pictures where he continues to argue that John Landis is "a national fucking treasure